D

Daisy: Wife of Uncle
Ash in Go Down, Moses ("The Bear"). Major
de Spain suggested he enjoyed going to the hunting camp in the woods to
escape Daisy's cooking.

Damuddy: The
grandmother in The Sound and the Fury, and
whose death marked the earliest recorded event in the novel. It was during
her wake that Caddy Compson
climbed a pear tree to see what was going on inside the house.

de Spain,
Manfred: The bachelor son of Major
Cassius de Spain and a key figure in the latter two volumes of the Snopes
trilogy. He was a graduate of West Point and a veteran of the
Spanish-American War, serving as a second lieutenant in Cuba. He became
mayor of Jefferson in 1904 as
automobiles began to replace horse- and mule-drawn wagons, and he continued
to play a role in banking and politics. In The Town,
he took Flem Snopes' wife, Eula,
as a mistress, rewarding Flem by making him superintendent of the power
plant. Manfred successfully fended off his chief rival for Eula's affection,
city attorney Gavin Stevens. Upon
the death of old Bayard Sartoris
in 1920, he became president of the Sartoris Bank, a position he held until
Flem revealed his long-standing affair with Eula to Eula's father, Will
Varner; subsequently, Manfred was forced to sell his bank shares to Flem.
He planned to leave Jefferson with Eula, but before he could do so, she
committed suicide. Nevertheless, he left Jefferson "for business
reasons and health." He appears also in The
Mansion and The Reivers, where it
is revealed he was the first person in Jefferson to own an automobile. See
also Major Hoxey.

Deacon: An elderly
black train porter to whom Quentin
Compson entrusted his suicide letters in The
Sound and the Fury. According to Quentin, he supposedly "hadn't
missed a train at the beginning of school in forty years, and ... he could
pick out a Southerner with one glance." He marched in all the parades
in Cambridge and was one of few people whom Quentin trusted.

The Delta: In
Mississippi, the term by which the common floodplain of the Mississippi
and Yazoo Rivers is known. It
stretches nearly 200 miles from the Tennessee line near Memphis to near Vicksburg
and is about 60 miles wide at its widest point. A mostly flat region with
rich black soil, bayous, sluggish streams, and oxbow lakes, and the
traditional location of large cotton plantations, it differs markedly both
in terrain and in way of life from the red clay hills of Yoknapatawpha
County. Faulkner refers to it in The Sound and
the Fury, Sanctuary, and especially
in the "Delta Autumn" section of Go Down,
Moses.

Dick,
Colonel Nathaniel G.: Union Army officer who called a stop to the
search for two boys (Bayard
and Ringo) who had shot an army horse,
even though he knew they were hiding under Granny
Millard's hoopskirts. Later, he ordered the return of Granny's silver,
mules, and servants to her, with considerable interest due to a clerical
error.